Character Sets

[Voxman]

We have a problem with foreign character sets making the shipping address sometimes unreadable. Anyone else experience this? We did set up something for character sets a while back (years ago) but now seeing more and more of the same problem Is their some kind of universal code that we can install to take care of this in one shot(linux)? Or does each one have to be handled individually? Any and all help will be appreciated.

[WebWalla]

Not sure I fully understand your problem, but isn't the Unicode/UTF-8 character set basically what you need?

[encyclo]

What issues are you experiencing with non-ASCII characters? Are you talking about western-European languages with accented characters, or a larger issue with non-western characters (Japanese, Russian, etc.)? Also, what character encoding are you currently using on your site?

UTF-8 is often a good response ot encoding problems when you have to deal with a wide range of characters. In Linux you can use the

iconv

utility to convert between charsets. This short introduction to UTF-8 might be useful to you:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Voxman]

What I will do is get our code guy in on this conversation. It didn't take long before I was over my head... but yah we've had issues with degree symbols (I know that some European countries use these symbols in their addresses) but sometimes the characters are unreadable. I'll see if it's possible to post some of these characters.

I know our guy did something to make it better but we still have issues from time to time and it bothers our customers if we have to ask them to type in a word document so we can read it. It's like they have a completely different keyboard with more than the normal accents etc.

Like I said..I'll bring another guy in on this to explain better

I really appreciate you taking the time to help me.